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5 Reasons Why Doing Paid Review is Good for Your Blog

6th December 2008

Paid reviews are one of the most common make money online methods that bloggers can do. Paid review is basically a website reviewed by a blogger in exchange for cash – in other words, you are paid to review someone else’s websites.

Many people avoid doing paid review for one reason – Google don’t like any form of payments involved in every website – either it’s for a review, purchasing link in exchange for PageRank ‘juice’ transfer, etc.

Experts said, and they are not bluffing at all, that if Google catches you doing so, your website will be penalised – reducing your PageRank, or even some reported that their blogs are delisted from Google after they trying to make money through link sales or paid reviews.

Nevertheless, nobody knows how Google ‘caughts’ violators – in effect, some people decided to play safe and rely on other methods of blogs and websites monetisation (advertisements, sponsorships, affiliate sales, etc.)

I, on the contrary, am with those that decided to play on the borderline – No matter what the expert said about paid reviews, I view that they are actually good for your blog.

My reasoning, Suppose Google penalises you by reducing your PageRank, or even delisting your blog from their database – so what?

Anything focusing on PageRank is a bad idea. Doing reviews or sell links are often not due to your site/blog’s PageRank – there are way, way much more things for a client to decide your site/blog is appealing to advertisers:

  • Your blog traffic and readership – the apparent, the obvious, and the reason why you should forget PageRank and focus on those key areas.
  • Your blog link popularity or back link counts – how many sites have a link to your blog?
  • Your blog post in social bookmarking front pages – this, my friend, will bring loads of traffic to your blog.
  • Technorati authorities – the more, the higher you will rank in Technorati blog ranking.
  • Your blog reviewed by authority blogs – this is what money can’t buy (well actually you can buy a review on authorities blog, but most review your blog because you rocks.)

And those are just to name a few.

5 reasons why doing paid review is good for your blog

In fact, doing paid review is not only just okay – it is great for your blog, for 5 reasons:

  1. It gets you paid, while growing your blog’s asset, the blog posts – As long as you don’t do review for the sake of it, but to give your reader a quality blog post that includes useful supporting information in it, not only blabbering your way to reach the minimum word counts.
  2. If you blog for a while, you notice that sometimes, blog post ideas are hard to find. Doing a review is actually give you topic to blog on.
  3. Reviewing other websites often allow you to learn new services or products that your clients have – in turn, you might actually be a more efficient and effective blogger if you choose to use the services or products.
  4. Your quality reviews will be your portfolio – sooner or later, you will be approached by advertisers that are interested in your review services – in my own experience, this advertisers pay A LOT more per post than if you joined paid review networks.
  5. From my experience, your review clients are actually promoting the reviews you wrote for them – they will social bookmark the blog post, write about it or link to the review in their own sites/blogs, and even leave a comment on the review post you wrote – all for the benefit of your blog!

Think about it – treat Google as your partner to grow your business, but never fear or even count on them! build your blog holistically – never build yours to cater Google audience only, but also other blogosphere audiences – social media, other blogs, etc. – so that if Google did penalise you, you have a safety net to fall on.

Image by pedrosimoes7.

Ivan Widjaya is the owner of AsepOnde.com, as well as the founder of several online businesses: PrevisoMedia.com, Noobpreneur.com and Uptourist.com. He runs his business from anywhere, anytime he wants.

Comments

  • Allen Taylor
    Posted at 11:30 am December 6, 2008
    Allen Taylor
    Author

    Nice writing. You are on my RSS reader now so I can read more from you down the road.

    Allen Taylor

  • Asep Onde
    Posted at 11:31 pm December 6, 2008
    Asep Onde
    Author

    Hi Allen,

    Thanks for visiting and subscribing to my blog 🙂

    Have a good day!

  • Kenneth
    Posted at 6:37 am December 12, 2008
    Kenneth
    Author

    The money from paid reviews is rather tempting. And anyway, if your pagerank gets reduced, you could always try building it up again over time, or starting another blog.

  • Asep Onde
    Posted at 6:49 am December 12, 2008
    Asep Onde
    Author

    Hi Kenneth,

    True… Anyway, from my own experience, not many advertisers want anything related to PR, these days.